Philippines' slow and pathetic internet speed is costing us Billions

Philippine Internet is an embarrassment is most likely an understatement. People here (specifically the government and maybe the 'ruling' telcos) seem to have no idea about what's possible with a fast internet speed and connection.

Most if not all Filipino netizens were in an uproar last year when the ASEAN DNA report was published showing and comparing the average internet speed index for ASEAN in 2014.

We were at the bottom of ASEAN countries, with only 3.6mbps internet while Laos (4.0mbps), Myanmar (4.9mbps), Vietnam (13.3mbps), Thailand (17.7mbps), and all the other countries leave us in the dumps. In 2014, the average global internet speed was at 17.5mbps and the US was at 22.3mbps while our neighbor country Singapore topped the list with 61.0mbps.

But really, has anything changed since then or at all?

A Sad Reality:
As of May 2015, the Philippines’ Broadband Internet Average Speed is 3.63 Mbps, ranking us 176th of 202 countries. Our average Mobile Internet Speed, on the other hand, is at 4.43Mbps, ranking us 92nd of 112 countries.

The cost per Mbps in the Philippines was also one of the most expensive with an average value of $18.18. To compare, the global average is $5.21.

Out of the 202 countries, the country with the slowest download speed is Equatorial Guinea with 0.93 Mbps.

For a country dubbed as the “Social Media Capital of the World,” our internet services are not even at par with the global average speed. I guess, we really do own that title for our internet speed's main use is only for social media (facebook, twitter), no advanced applications, nothing more!

We are paying too much money for poor quality of service.

Billions lost:
It is not only consumers, but also businesses and even government. Now, I don't have the actual data but let's simplify it based on "Opportunity Cost" in terms of time wasted or productivity loss.

Consumers, government and businesses don't want to just surf the internet, but want to use it to access valuable services such as fast email, business critical information and applications.

Based on a recent UK article, a survey commissioned by the Daisy Group estimates that slow net connections cost the UK a staggering £11 billion a year.

We can pretty much all agree with this. If your website loads up or is running slow, your company, your business and even the government is losing money! Imagine this, a 1-second decrease in AMAZON's page load time would annually cost $1.6 Billion in sales!

For our government, that could have meant more people filing loans online via SSS.GOV.PH; if we could do our taxes online, imagine those freelancers lining up paying their taxes! The point being much better tax collection and loan revenue!

I forgot to mention the billions of pesos lost from the Filipino People's pockets due to just bad internet service, waste of time from even trying to troubleshoot with customer service reps, and just paying for the really expensive internet without getting the money's worth.

Now if the Filipino worker (through services or IT-BPO industry) were to lose a total of let's say 38 hours of productivity per year due to down-time or slow access, with an assumed per hour rate of Php100.00 per worker for 20 Million workers, how much is that? ([Php100/hour x 38 hours] x 20 Million) That's about 76 Billion Pesos (just over $1.5 ++Billion) right there!

It is time to wake up, stand up and do something about this. The Philippines' slow and pathetic internet speed is costing us Billions!